What is luxury Society?

The creative arts might be considered to include painting and sculpture but also drama, poetry and creative writing, dance, composition and music, and others. This debate will not focus on literature and other disciplines, such as History of Art, where the main role is to analyze the creative output of others. Instead the focus here is on those degrees that seek to train students to be practitioners of those disciplines rather than generalists with a focus on discussing them.

There are two possible approaches to this debate (in fact there are many but two are the most obvious). The first – and the one most clearly in the spirit of the motion – is that the creative arts add little to the economy directly and that if society is going to have universities, especially in those countries where they are funded through direct taxation, then students should be focusing on subjects that have a proven economic worth. Although the arts do contribute financially to an economy, it tends not to be in the way that, say, languages, engineering or economics do. There is another aspect here, which leads into the second interpretation, that graduates of creative arts departments rarely make their living in that field; the competition is simply too fierce.

That brings us on to Prop’s second choice for a definition, which is that if people really want to learn the creative arts then a university setting is not the right place to do so. Stage schools and fine art colleges are often separate from universities and, even then, some argue that if someone has real talent, they should just get on with it. There are countless examples of people who have excelled in the arts who have no formal training and learnt their craft ‘on the job’.